Mariah Blake

Senior Reporter

Mariah Blake is a senior reporter at Mother Jones. She has also written for The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, The Nation, The New Republic, the Washington Monthly, and the Columbia Journalism Review, among other publications. Email her at mblake [at] motherjones [dot] com or follow her on Twitter.

A trove of secret documents details the US government's global push for shale gas.

One icy morning in February 2012, Hillary Clinton's plane touched down in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, which was just digging out from a fierce blizzard. Wrapped in a thick coat, the secretary of state descended the stairs to the snow-covered tarmac, where she and her aides piled into a motorcade bound for the presidential palace. That afternoon, they huddled with Bulgarian leaders, including Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, discussing everything from Syria's bloody civil war to their joint search for loose nukes. But the focus of the talks was fracking. The previous year, Bulgaria had signed a five-year, $68 million deal, granting US oil giant Chevron millions of acres in shale gas concessions. Bulgarians were outraged. Shortly before Clinton arrived, tens of thousands of protesters poured into the streets carrying placards that read "Stop fracking with our water" and "Chevron go home." Bulgaria's parliament responded by voting overwhelmingly for a fracking moratorium.

Some of movement's fiercest activists aren't men.

When many people think of the men's rights movement, the image that springs to mind is lonely men lurking in chat rooms and railing against women. But in recent years, a group of brash, witty female activists has taken up the cause. It may seem counterintuitive that women would be helping drive the conversation about a movement that's fighting anti-male discrimination and campaigning fiercely against feminism. But according to Dean Esmay of the men's rights organization A Voice for Men, the fact that they shatter expectations is what makes them such good emissaries. "People want to believe we're a bunch of sad, pathetic losers who can't get laid and are just bitter because our wives left us," Esmay explains. "The very presence of women in the movement creates cognitive dissonance." Often, he adds, this dissonance makes people more receptive than they otherwise would be.

Who are these women men's rights activists? And why do they embrace a movement that some see as blatantly misogynistic? Below is a rundown of key players. A few of them, including Janet Bloomfield, who was the focus of a recent in Vice News article, have been in the spotlight recently. Others are virtually unknown to the mainstream, but within the movement they're seen as luminaries.

Karen Straughan: The YouTube Sensation

Karen Straughan Illustrated by Alison Tieman, courtesy of A Voice for Men

In late 2011, Straughan, a foul-mouthed fortysomething Canadian waitress and mother of three, sat down at her kitchen table and began ruminating about the sexes: "I keep hearing from the feminist camp that femaleness has always been undervalued. But I've always contended that it's the exact opposite…If it comes down to a man and a woman in a burning building and you can only save one, the expectation is that you choose the woman every single time. So honestly, whose humanity are we placing above whose?" She then posted a video of her talk on YouTube, where it has racked up more than a million views.

Straughan, who has a brazen air and a taste for ribbed tank tops (a.k.a. "wife beaters"), has since become one of the most visible faces of the men's rights movement. She has nearly 70,000 YouTube subscribers. And she gets emails from men around the world who stumble on her videos and spend hours on end binge watching. Straughan, who wrote erotic fiction as a sideline before getting involved in men's rights, also helped launch the Honey Badger Brigade, a ragtag group of female men's rights activists. This summer, when protesters threatened to shut down A Voice for Men's first conference in Detroit, the Honey Badgers collected more than $8,000 in donations and flew to Motor City to act as "human shields." The Honey Badgers also produce an online radio show, covering men's issues and geek culture. Recent topics include false rape allegations, the treatment of military veterans, and "the shit feminists say."

Pizzey, a 75-year-old British author and anti-domestic-violence advocate, traces her interest in men's rights back to her own childhood and years of brutal beatings from her mother. She later went on to found England's first shelter for battered women. Pizzey maintains that most of the victims who sought refuge there were themselves violent. She came to believe that women deserved a share of the blame for domestic abuse and that the fledgling feminist movement unfairly demonized men by casting them as the sole aggressors. "This huge edifice of radical feminism made this about 'patriarchy' rather that human relationships," she says. "In the process, it pulled the whole discussion away from the needs of people in violent families."

Pizzey eventually began offering shelter to battered men while crusading against feminism, which she dubs "the Evil Empire." After a bomb scare and a string of death threats, in 1979 she fled to the United States, where she helped set up domestic-violence shelters in 21 cities. She also worked with lawyers to defend men claiming they had been falsely accused of rape and domestic violence—an endeavor she funded by writing adventure novels. Pizzey later embraced nonfiction, and wrote frequently for British newspapers, such as the Daily Mail (sample headline: "Why I loathe feminism…and believe it will ultimately destroy the family"). She also traveled the world speaking to battered men's groups. Today, she is editor-at-large of A Voice for Men, and a hero of the men's rights movement. She feels very much in her element. "For many years, I was this lone voice, and I was hated for it," she explains. "Now, you just don't feel quite so lonely."

Janet Bloomfield: The Social-Media Provocateur

Bloomfield has landed in the spotlight recently as a driving force behind Women Against Feminism, a social-media campaign featuring photos of women with scraps of paper listing their reasons for rejecting feminism. Since the week before last, when the campaign went viral, Bloomfield—a thirtysomething homemaker and doctoral candidate—has been making the network rounds, with interviews on ABC, the BBC, and NBC's Today Show.

Bloomfield, who lives somewhere in Canada (she keeps her location and the names of her three children secret to shield them from harassment), is an unlikely champion for men's rights. In college, she studied film theory, and learned to view the world through a feminist lens. But after giving birth to her first child, she decided to stay home and was shocked by the reaction from other women. "It wasn't so much the disdain for my choice or the idea that I wasted my education," she says. "It was that they treated me like I was crazy to rely on my husband—as if somewhere lurking inside of him was a sex-starved monster who would toss me out like trash." Bloomfield began trading letters with her friend, Pixie, who was camped out in the hospital after giving birth to a critically ill baby boy and believed the intensive care staff was treating the sick baby girls more tenderly. Their letters soon morphed into grumbling about the lot of boys and the treatment of stay-at-home moms.

After immersing themselves in the men's rights blogosphere, in 2012, the pair launched the in-your-face blog, JudgyBitch.com. Bloomfield's anti-feminist screeds, piled with obscenities and inflammatory theories about rape and domestic violence, made a splash in the men's rights circles, and the following year she began writing for A Voice for Men, where she now manages social media. She's also broken into mainstream news and opinion sites, including Thought Catalog, which recently published Bloomfield's essay, "I'm an Anti-Sexist, Liberal Doctoral Student, Wife, and Mother Who Supports the Men's Rights Movement Over Feminism, Here's Why."

For much of her career, Venker followed the path blazed by her aunt, the anti-feminist crusader Phyllis Schlafly. In 2011, the pair even cowrote a book, The Flipside of Feminism, arguing that freedom and power have only made women unhappy. But their paths began to diverge the following year when Venker, who in addition to authoring books is a frequent Fox News commentator, published a column on FoxNews.com called "The War on Men." It made the case that men were opting out of marriage because career-minded women had lost their womanly qualities and become angry and competitive. And it urged women to "surrender to their nature—their femininity" if they wanted to find husbands. Predictably, the piece went viral, stirring up a whirlwind of criticism. But Venker was also flooded with grateful emails from male readers. "Men were writing to say, 'Thank you, thank you!'" she recalls. "'Finally, somebody gets it!'" Inspired by the outpouring, Venker launch the men's rights blog Women for Men and shifted the focus of her own commentary to men's issues. In her recent FoxNews.com columns, Venker argues that white men face oppression "unlike anything American women have faced," and claims that men's "success in fields such as medicine, engineering and technology have done more to liberate women from the constraints of their former lives than a busload of feminists could ever hope to do." She also maintains that surrendering to male power is an "aphrodisiac" that "grants women access to the deepest parts of a man's soul."

In 1969, Cools took part in a supposedly peaceful sit-in to protest racism at a Montreal university. It ended up exploding into one of the most violent student riots in Canada's history, with protesters setting fires and tossing computers out of windows. Cools, who was sentenced to four months in prison but later pardoned, went on to found one of Canada's first shelters for battered women. Then, in 1984, the Barbados native became the first black person ever to serve in the Canadian Senate.

According to the Globe and Mail, "Women's groups applauded the addition of a minority firebrand to the chamber of dozy old white men." Her belief that domestic violence was a two-way street later put her at odds with the feminist movement, but many Canadians embraced her ideas. In 1995, when Cools told an International Women's Day gathering that "behind every abusing husband is an abusing mother," she was inundated with grateful handwritten letters. Many of them were from people who had been abused by their mothers or men claiming they had been falsely accused of domestic violence during divorce proceedings.

Galvanized, Cools—a Liberal Party member turned independent—helped launch a parliamentary committee that traveled the country holding emotional standing-room-only hearings on child custody laws. Critics branded it the "politically incorrect committee'' because it heard testimony from hundreds of men, grandparents, and second wives, who spoke tearfully about being cut off from children by a legal system that they alleged favored mothers. For Cools, who lost two siblings to childhood illness, their stories hit close to home. "I understood very early in life what it meant for parents to lose a child," she told the National Post in the late 1990s. "I've always known a parent cannot recover from that. And this is why I will not tolerate the thought of any parent taking a child away from another parent."

The committee's final report recommended rewriting custody laws to ensure both parents access to the children and making false domestic violence allegations a crime. Despite overwhelming public support, a decade and a half later, Cools is still fighting to bring these proposals to fruition. Her dogged struggle has won her adoration in men's rights circles—so much so that A Voice for Men invited the regal, silver-haired septuagenarian to deliver the first speech at its inaugural conference. "The cause that before you and the things that you fight for are valid and just," Cools told the gathering. "I am on the home stretch of my public career, so you and younger soldiers must come. I encourage soldiers to arm themselves, and to put on battle gear, because it is a fight."

Oil and gas companies want Washington to believe that fracking can save Ukraine from Russia. It can't.

A worker passes by natural gas compressing equipment near the village of Kovalivka, Ukraine.

As Ukraine sinks deeper into crisis, the oil and gas industry is pressing the United States to deploy its abundant natural gas supply as a weapon against Russia—and lawmakers of both parties are lining up behind the proposal. "We have this natural-gas boom," Rep. Pat Tiberi (R-Ohio) said last week, after the downing of a Malaysia Airlines jet, allegedly by pro-Russian rebels. "We can use this newfound energy as a diplomatic tool to give the European leaders some backbone in standing up to the Russians."

"The ability to turn the tables and put the Russian leader in check lies right beneath our feet, in the form of vast supplies of natural energy." —Rep. John Boehner

Their enthusiasm is understandable: Roughly half the natural gas Russia ships to Europe flows through Ukraine. During past disputes, Russia has clamped down on the nation's gas supply, creating turmoil in European energy markets. Many US politicians fear this dynamic could dampen Europe's response to the Ukraine crisis and have begun looking to the bounty of natural gas from the domestic fracking boom to counter Russia's energy dominance. As House Speaker John Boehner put it in a March Wall Street Journal Op-Ed, "The ability to turn the tables and put the Russian leader in check lies right beneath our feet, in the form of vast supplies of natural energy."

Washington has also seen a flurry of proposals to speed up natural gas exports. Last month, following a lobbying blitz by oil and gas companies, including ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, Halliburton, and Chevron, the House passed a bill requiring the Department of Energy (DOE) to rule on proposed natural gas export terminals within 90 days. The Senate has weighed similar bills and amendments. While they haven't managed to bypass the prevailing Senate gridlock, these measures have considerable bipartisan support, and backers are determined to push them through. The fight over expediting natural gas exports helped derail the popular Shaheen-Portman energy efficiency bill and bogged down negotiations over an aid package for Ukraine. As Congress prepares to adjourn for its August recess, opponents of expanding exports are bracing for a new onslaught. "We are on the lookout, particularly for amendments being slipped into must-pass funding bills," says one senior Senate staffer.

Update: Adams has appended a note to the story that likened journalists to Nazis: "After careful analysis, I have come to the conclusion that the Monsanto Collaborators website is a bait-and-switch trap engineered by the biotech industry in an effort to lure in support from GMO skeptics and then discredit them with some sort of insane 'call to action' of some kind....For the record, in no way do I condone vigilante violence against anyone."

For years, Natural News—a conspiracy-minded alternative medicine website that attracts roughly 7 million unique visitors each month—has been crusading against the practice of genetically modifying food. But this week the site's proprietor, Mike Adams, took the campaign to new extremes with a post comparing journalists who are critical of GMO activists to "Nazi collaborators." Adams also urged readers "to actively plan and carry out the killing of those engaged in heinous crimes against humanity." Below is a snippet from his anti-media diatribe:

Monsanto is widely recognize as the most hated and most evil corporation on the planet. Even so, several internet-based media websites are now marching to Monsanto's orders, promoting GMOs and pursuing defamatory character assassination tactics against anyone who opposes GMOs, hoping to silence their important voices.

These Monsanto collaborator sites tend to be "leftist" publications but also include at least one prominent business and finance publisher on the political right. All of them are Monsanto collaborators who have signed on to accelerate heinous crimes being committed against humanity under the false promise of "feeding the world" with toxic GMOs.

The rambling post goes on to compare the agrochemical giant Monsanto to IG Farben, a "chemical conglomerate run by Nazi collaborators" that "used Jewish prisoners as human guinea pigs in horrific medical experiments." And it calls on readers to target journalist who Adams views as pro-GMO by publicly listing their names:

Just as history needed to record the names and deeds of Nazi war criminals, so too must all those collaborators who are promoting the death and destruction caused by GMOs be named for the historical record. The true extent of their collaboration with an anti-human regime will all become readily apparent once the GMO delusion collapses and mass global starvation becomes an inescapable reality.

I'm hoping someone will create a website listing all the publishers, scientists and journalists who are now Monsanto propaganda collaborators. I have no doubt such a website would be wildly popular and receive a huge influx of visitors, and it would help preserve the historical record of exactly which people contributed to the mass starvation and death which will inevitably be unleashed by GMO agriculture (which is already causing mass suicides in India and crop failures worldwide).

Still, Adams has a large pool of readers who take his ideas seriously. After he published his screed likening journalists to Nazi sympathizers, a "Monsanto Collaborators" website appeared with images of Nazi soldiers and emaciated corpses alongside a list of reporters whom Adams accuses of being in the GMO industry's pocket. The heading reads "Journalist Collaborators."

A recent accident highlights how state fracking laws protect corporate trade secrets over public safety.

A dead fish near the site of the recent fracking-chemical spill in Monroe County, Ohio.

On the morning of June 28, a fire broke out at a Halliburton fracking site in Monroe County, Ohio. As flames engulfed the area, trucks began exploding and thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals spilled into a tributary of the Ohio River, which supplies drinking water for millions of residents. More than 70,000 fish died. Nevertheless, it took five days for the Environmental Protection Agency and its Ohio counterpart to get a full list of the chemicals polluting the waterway. "We knew there was something toxic in the water," says an environmental official who was on the scene. "But we had no way of assessing whether it was a threat to human health or how best to protect the public."

This episode highlights a glaring gap in fracking safety standards. In Ohio, as in most other states, fracking companies are allowed to withhold some information about the chemical stew they pump into the ground to break up rocks and release trapped natural gas. The oil and gas industry and its allies at the American Legislative exchange Council (ALEC), a pro-business outfit that has played a major role in shaping fracking regulation, argue that the formulas are trade secrets that merit protection. But environmental groups say the lack of transparency makes it difficult to track fracking-related drinking water contamination and can hobble the government response to emergencies, such as the Halliburton spill in Ohio.